Love Uptime Kuma? Keep it - and add an external witness.

Yes - this is a common and legitimate setup. Keep Uptime Kuma watching internal services from inside your network, and let HostTracker watch your public-facing sites and APIs from outside, across 300+ checkpoints. If your own infrastructure goes down, HostTracker (being external and independent) is what actually notices and pages you - Kuma, sharing the same fate as what it monitors, cannot.

Whatever it was watching goes silently unmonitored, because the monitor shares an outage with the infrastructure underneath it - it cannot alert on its own downtime. This is exactly the gap an external, independently hosted service like HostTracker closes: it keeps checking, and can page you, even when your entire hosting account or region is unreachable.

Email, SMS, voice calls, Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty with automatic incident resolve, Mattermost, Pushover, Pushbullet, Telegram, Discord, Viber, browser push, and signed webhooks with 15 typed events for anything custom.

They are included. Paid plans carry a monthly SMS allowance that tops up automatically, and voice-call alerts ride the same credit balance - no separate provider account to wire up. On a self-hosted Kuma instance, a phone call or text message means connecting and paying for your own SMS/voice provider first.

HostTracker adds full browser transaction checks (log in, add to cart, pay), page-speed monitoring, database queries, SNMP counters, server resource checks, DNS blacklist (DNSBL) monitoring, Google Web Risk verdicts, and domain-expiry checks through registry RDAP data - 14 monitor types in total, plus 11 free instant-check tools you can run without an account.

Yes, on every plan including the free one. HostTracker's status pages add components, incident history, and subscriber notifications over email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhooks - on top of the kind of page Kuma's own self-hosted status page already gives you. Enterprise plans add white-label branding and custom domains.

Uptime Kuma's backup is a JSON snapshot of your configuration from Settings, Backup, Export JSON, not a documented bulk-export REST API, so most teams just recreate their monitor list directly in HostTracker - one call with the bulk API, or one command with ht-cli: ht-cli monitors bulk-create --json @monitors.json. The 30-day trial fits 100 monitors, so you can run HostTracker alongside Kuma for a month before deciding how the two fit together long-term.

The software itself, yes - it is MIT-licensed and genuinely free forever, with no monitor limits, no feature gating and no vendor to eventually start charging you. What is not free is the infrastructure and the time to run it: you need a server (a small VPS runs roughly $5-20/month at market rates if you do not already have spare hardware, or nothing at all on a Raspberry Pi or home server you own), and you need to keep that server patched, backed up and online, which is ongoing work rather than a one-time setup. Neither cost is hidden or unfair - it is the honest total cost of free software, which is different from a free service. If you already run infrastructure you maintain anyway, the marginal cost is genuinely close to zero.

Partially, and only for some monitor types. Its core HTTP(S), TCP, WebSocket, Docker and push checks still run only from wherever its own server lives. Since early 2026 an optional Globalping-powered monitor type lets an HTTP, ping or DNS check run from a single community-hosted probe you pick instead of your own server - a real, shipped capability. What it still does not do is what multi-location monitoring means for a hosted service: checking the same target from several vantage points at once and using agreement across them to confirm a real outage before alerting. Globalping checks one location per monitor, draws on a third-party volunteer probe network with its own rate limits and credit tiers, and does not extend to Kuma's other monitor types. For internal services a single vantage point is often exactly right; for a public website, this is the clearest reason technical teams add a hosted service alongside Kuma rather than instead of it.

Probably not entirely - it depends on what you are monitoring and why. If Uptime Kuma is watching internal infrastructure you control and its self-maintained, mostly single-location model has caused you no real problems, there is no strong reason to abandon a tool that is working and free. The switch, or the addition, makes sense when the target is public-facing and the two structural limits start to matter for real: an outage a customer notices before you do, or a monitoring blackout during exactly the incident you needed visibility into. Many teams land on running both: Kuma for internal services, a hosted tool for the public-facing surface that actually needs multi-location, redundant, always-on monitoring. The free plan and the 30-day full-feature trial cost nothing to test alongside an existing Kuma install.

Rarely because of the software: it has around 90,000 GitHub stars, checks as often as every 20 seconds, and covers HTTP, keyword, JSON query, WebSocket, TCP, ping, DNS, push heartbeats, Steam and Docker. What sends people looking is everything around it. It runs on a machine you own, so it is a single vantage point unless you build a fleet, and it cannot report the outage that takes down its own host. SMS and voice exist among its 90-plus notification providers, but you wire and pay for the gateway. Migration is a UI-driven JSON snapshot rather than a documented bulk-export API. And upgrades, certificates, storage and backups are yours.

They trade different things. Kuma is free software you control, with 20-second checks and ten check types, but it runs from one place you maintain and its SMS and voice go through a gateway you pay for. UptimeRobot is hosted and needs no maintenance, with 50 free monitors at a fixed five-minute interval and 15-second checks on its Scale tier at EUR 65/month billed annually, but it checks from four broad regions and its SMS and voice credits arrive as a one-time bundle. Neither watches DNS blacklists, Google Web Risk verdicts, databases or SNMP counters, which is the gap HostTracker fills from $14/month across 300+ checkpoints.

It depends on who keeps the monitoring running. With someone who enjoys operating it, Kuma on a small external server is a fine and cheap answer. Without that person, maintenance becomes the risk: an expired certificate, a full disk or a host reboot turns the monitor off silently. Agency work also needs more than uptime - certificate and domain expiry, DNS blacklist status, Google Web Risk verdicts and a brandable status page per client - which HostTracker covers in one account from $14/month, with SMS and voice on a monthly allowance and a 30-day, 100-monitor trial with no credit card to run beside Kuma.